"No More Good Days" started in media res following a car crash involving handsome FBI Agent Mark Benford (Joseph Fiennes), before we actually flashed back four hours. The aforementioned Benford is our hero; husband of doctor Olivia (Sonya Walger), father to little Charlie (Lennon Wynn), and spearhead agent of Los Angeles-based taskforce partnering Demetri Noh (John Cho) and led by Stanford Wedeck (Courtney B. Vance)Benford and Noh are tailing a group of terrorists across town when everyone on the planet falls unconscious for exactly 2 minutes 17 seconds. Needless to say, the global blackout causes a great deal of subsequent catastrophes; vehicles pile-up on the freeways, hundreds of planes plunge from the sky, helicopters spin into skyscrapers, and people take advantage of the mass confusion to loot shops. It soon becomes apparent that the synchronized "blackout" is a misnomer, as most people experienced the titular "flash forward" to a point six months in the future. The flashes are corroborated between those sharing visions of each other, but nobody's sure how seriously to take them, if the events they predict can be avoided, and how they were triggered, by whom, and why.
Other characters are introduced in fairly perfunctory ways, just to highlight the different ways a glimpse of the future might impact your life: Bryce (Zachary Knighton), a suicidal intern who works with Olivia, sees a happier future and decides to embrace life, immediately rescuing a young surfer he spots from a pier; Olivia sees herself uncharacteristically cheating on her husband with a strange man; a father grieving the death of his soldier daughter is confused that his vision shows her very much alive; Noh saw no images, so assumes that means he'll be dead before then; a single woman sees herself pregnant; and Benford's flash provides an abundance of clues he remembers seeing pinned to a corkboard, involving an investigation called "Mosaic" that he hasn't started yet.
FlashForward did a great job of setting out its stall, which is half the job of an effective pilot. The fact you tend to know a new show's premise going in meant stretches of "No More Good Days" weren't offering us fresh information, but there was enough here to intrigue me into seeing where the show is headed. The characters weren't especially compelling (indeed, most were shorthand stereotypes), but most of the actors are established talent that it's easy to watch, so I'm hopeful they'll be able to tease out some interesting dynamics with the help of the writers.
My only major criticism was how the pilot felt a little crammed into 45-minutes and begged do be a 90-minute feature-length special. The blackouts occur less than 10-minutes into the episode, the blackout "event" is over after 17-minutes, and by the 40-minute mark it felt like things were almost back to normal. I can understand a TV series not having the budget or time to present an accurate reality of what it proposed -- I mean, two skyscrapers were felled in New York years ago and we're still feeling the effects, so imagine the upheaval of what Flash Forward poses -- but I still think it could have been handled better. A lot of the characters don't react in believable ways, considering what just happened to them...
To a large extent, Flash Forward's survival will hinge on what it has up its sleeve to keep the audience gripped now the premise has been setup. I'm certainly keen to get the answers to the many questions it poses (and it's a relief to know we'll get some of the answers fairly quickly, as the flash forward day is 29 April 2010), but will the show overcome the fact the story feels better suited to a movie rather than a TV series hoping to last five years or more? Lost managed to grow beyond a desert island drama about a group of plane crash survivors into something that encompassed underground hatches, ghosts, a smoke monster, mysterious corporations, and time-travel... so will Flash Forward find a similar way to widen its scope and keep audiences gripped by the minutiae?More than anything, I'm just curious to see how the writers plan to keep the ball rolling with their concept. Hopefully we'll see there's a more immediate threat for the characters to contend with, or a purpose behind "the event" we can't possibly be expected to guess at this stage. We'll most likely start piecing together a better picture from clues squirreled away in people's flash forward anecdotes, too -- like why that bird flew into a window, what a kangaroo was doing on the street, and who that man was seen walking around a stadium full of unconscious people...
28 September 2009
Five, 9pm
written by: David S. Goyer & Brannon Braga directed by: David S. Goyer starring: Joseph Fiennes (Mark Benford), Sonya Walger (Olivia Benford), John Cho (Demetri Noh), Jack Davenport (Lloyd Simcoe), Zachary Knighton (Bryce Varley), Peyton List (Nicole Kirby), Brian F. O'Byrne (Aaron Stark), Courtney B. Vance (Stanford Wedeck), Christine Woods (Janice Hawk), Cynthia Addai-Robinson (Nurse), Brandon Bell (Paramedic #1), James Carraway (Older Man), Genevieve Cortese (Tracy), Ammar Daraiseh (Arabic #1), Kelly Galindo (Distressed Woman), Ted Garcia (Pundit #3), Barry Shabaka Henley (Agent Vreede), Cooper Huckabee (Trucker), Drake Kemper (Teenaged Boy), Alex Kingston (Fiona Banks), Pete Koch (Paramedic #2), Bill Lagattuta (Pundit #2), Jim Lau (Asian Man), Chyna Layne (Nervous Woman), Loren Lester (Neurologist), Raj Maan (Arabic Man #2), Blair Redford (Joel), Rachel Roberts (Alda Hertzog), Bryce Robinson (Dylan Simcoe), Ken Rudulph (Pundit #1), Kent Shocknek (Medical Correspondent), Lennon Wynn (Charlie Benford), Lee Thompson Young (Agent Gough) & Daniel Zacapa (Hector)
